If Your Title Rhymes with “leaf”, “erector”, or “resident” – You Should Learn About Agile and Lean

If you are reading this blog, then you are either part of an Agile transformation or you are someone considering an agile transformation. If you are someone that works in a management or simply a position of authority at your organization, if you don’t know much about Agile or Lean except that they are the latest buzzwords that don’t seem to go away — well, you should learn more about them. Because, the words might change a little, but the practices and principles have been around for a while and they are not going to go away anytime soon.

Agile and Lean are a set of ideas and principles that shape principles which guide our behaviors and foster the frameworks by which teams use to get things done. These have come about because there’s a recognition that trying to build things that are a result of complex cognitive thinking cannot be done well and in a timely manner to keep up with the demands of consumers. Couple these demands with an exponentially growing and aggressive competitive marketplace — the concepts of focusing on building the right thing and eliminating the waste that keeps us from delivering things right have naturally emerged. Agile and Lean are not old ideas, there’s been a ton of learning and shaping of these ideas and principles. New frameworks and or practices emerge daily as our products evolve and the people creating them do the same.

Why Should You Learn Agile and Lean?

Have you ever said, “Dolly is a great leader and worker, I wish we could just clone her and have ten Dolly’s.”

Or, how about, “I wish our team would just make a decision and get it done.”

Well, Agile and Lean values promote: empowerment, trust, commitment, value, team work, transparency, and quality. All of these things involve, giving teams information and the vision, and then getting out of the way to let them deliver.

Another thing to note about the values above are that they are generally practiced by all organizations and you’ll find aspects of each word above within the corporate mission statements. By learning more about Agile and Lean, you can learn how to help your teams or leadership leverage the organizations’ values and adapt those advocated throughout Agile and Lean adoptions.

The predominant reason organizations and teams adopt agile is to respond better to change — that is market changes. The other reasons are productivity and quality, all things that help us make products people want to buy, at the price they are willing to pay, and ultimately with the right level of quality that help mitigate long-term cost of supporting. A byproduct of agile adoptions is improved morale.

How You Learning Agile and Lean Can Help

Agile and Lean advocates shrinking the feedback loops which improve communications amongst departments and ultimately help your employees make better decisions. Well, you understanding when the feedback loops happen, your role in the feedback loops, and the types of information shared at the different levels of the organization can help you keep yourself out of the way from the team. What I mean by this is that when sometimes things are going right, we’ll go back to what we are comfortable with and understand — and generally this means metrics and reports that may be costly to gather and result in anti-patterns for good team work.

The other value of you learning about Agile and Lean is that you can help facilitate the adoption by being a good leader and facilitating change practices. Keeping a level head when things aren’t going right, and providing guidance as to how best support the teams.

What Should You Do to Learn?

There’s a ton of reading materials out there. Just keep in mind that there’s a lot of books, articles, and blogs that focus on the practices and not as much on the strategic and scaling aspects around agile. This spaces is growing as organizations have realized that not only is there the “build better software” value, but the planning and practices around Enterprise Agile give organizations a framework to make better investments and harness the short feedback loops to improve ROI.

To help get you started, here are a few resources that have been recommended to me and I can vouch for their value of learning:

Training – Agile for Executives Workshop, VersionOne. This is a workshop that I’ve performed as well as my colleagues and it’s aimed at being a concise four hour session aimed at ensuring Executives understand the history, underpinnings, and execution models surrounding of Agile and Lean.